Winter 2004 - Real to Reel

The cinematic essays, video verite, diaristic and experimental non-fiction works in Real to Reel present a diverse spectrum of individual voices that observe and address the human condition and its varied examples of family and community.  These cultural investigations by artists into the dynamic flow of art and life reveal expressive and sometimes ironic or humorous images of everyday reality.  Real to Reel also rethinks social documentary practice at a time when the mediated reality of mainstream culture grows increasingly reductive and homogenous.  These artists speak to our times and develop new critical and narrative possibilities that examine the dialectic between subjective and consensus reality while exploring our relationship to nature, personal identity, history, cities and the representation of reality in contemporary media.  –Patrick Clancy

January 30, 2004 

Animal Attraction, Kathy High (USA), 2001, 59:04 min., video
“Animal Attraction was inspired by the plight of the filmmaker who was frustrated by the obnoxious behavior of her cat, Ernie.  As a last resort, she gave in to a friend’s suggestion to contact an animal communicator.  Both the filmmaker and the viewer become involved in a complex examination of our relationship to ‘nature.’” –Video Data Bank

Chigger Country, George Kuchar (USA), 1999, 23:45 min., video
“Exhibiting the rawness of video verite and the theatricality of fiction, Kuchar’s self-narrated tapes record close-up observations of the personal routines and social interactions of his daily life. Significantly, these low budget, low-tech tapes are edited completely ‘in-camera’ with no postproduction.  This direct, spontaneous use of low-end technology heightens the diaries’ unmediated intimacy and subjectivity.” –Electronic Arts Intermix

February 6, 2004   

 Lost Sound, John Smith (UK) and Graeme Miller (UK), 2001, 28 min., video
Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audiotape found by the artists within a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with sound and images of the place where it was found.  “Hanging from trees like mistletoe, from lampposts and awnings like flotsam from an impossible high tide… Smith and Miller make a modern tangleweed of magnetic tape sing its discarded memories.” –2001 Pandaemonium Festival Catalogue, London

Tsukiji, Allan Sekula (USA), 2001, 43:30 min., video shown on DVD
“Tsukiji is a film about the world's largest fish market, in Tokyo, one of the last proletarian spaces in that city.  In this sense, it harkens back to the ‘city symphony’ films of the 1920s.  By invoking the memory of the communist novelist Takiji Kobayashi, it also remembers a forgotten intersection of modernism and realism.” –Allan Sekula

Projeto Apollo, Eder Santos (Brazil), 2000, 4 min., video
“Santos recreates the historic Apollo lunar landing for this essayistic video that uses simulation to interrogate representation.  Relating a long-circulated rumor that the landing was actually faked in a NASA studio, Santos delicately negotiates the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction.” –Electronic Arts Intermix

The Tower, Quirine Racke (Netherlands) and Helena Muskens (Netherlands), 2001, 15:34 min., video
“In interviews with three generations of the Flatzes, reality and fantasy tend to become pretty mixed up as they talk openly, and with a keen sense of drama, about their lives, money, art, love, misunderstandings and dreams.  The theatrical manner in which they do this almost makes one wonder whether this is a family or just a group of actors.” –Video Data Bank

February 13, 2004 

Fishtank, Richard Billingham (UK), 1998, 46:40 min., video
“Billingham’s video pushes you so close to his fighting, drinking, low-income family that it hurts.  His photographs have always wrong-footed any neat interpretation, and now Fishtank uses a camcorder to up the emotional ante with an often excruciating, sometimes exquisite fusion of intimacy and objectivity.” –Louisa Buck, Artforum

Gone, Cecilia Dougherty (USA), 2001, 36:42 min., 2-channel video
“Partially a re-staging of one episode from the 1970s proto-reality TV series An American Family, Gone presents elaborate and intricate new possibilities for narrative through the use of double-screen projection, evoking complex themes of nostalgia, history, memory and loss. Recombining low fidelity with high concept, Gone creates a unique vision of inner and outer life on the margins of culture.” –Ed Halter, New York Underground Film Festival

“The issues of cultural investigation, family life, reconstruction of reality through artifice and the emergence of a truth no one was anticipating mesh so completely as to be not only inseparable, but also paradoxically supporting and even responsible for one another.” –Cecilia Dougherty